Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is expensive and it has high maintenance costs. However, a robotic approach provides much more flexibility, enabling a variety of configurations, easy parallel processing and is relatively inexpensive compared to CNC. Robots struggle to achieve high positioning accuracy and are more prone to disturbances from process forces. The objective of this work is to characterise the robot position and velocity errors, which depend on the build strategy deployed. An assessment has been done as to whether these errors would cause problems in additive manufacturing techniques. These errors depend on the tool path, ranging from simple to complex geometric patterns. The errors are determined using a laser speckle imaging technique to determine the robot translation via the normalised cross-correlation of laser speckle patterns. Finally, different compensation strategies have been developed and validated by building test parts.